GOTHAM represents an ambitious research programme to gain robust, relevant and transferable knowledge of past and present day patterns and trends of regional climate extremes and variability of vulnerable areas identified by the IPCC, including the tropics and high-latitudes. It will achieve this by identifying the influence of remote drivers, or teleconnections, on regional climate variability, and assessing their relative impact.[more]

Work package 5:Monsoon-midlatitude teleconnections and precipitation extremes over the Himalayas in a changing climate (lead by R. Krishnan)

Workpackage 5 will focus on the basic interactive dynamics of mid-latitude Rossby waves with monsoon circulation systems during flood-inducing extreme precipitation events over the Himalayan foothill region. We will assess the effect of Indo-Pacific SST variability on monsoon-mid-latitude interactions and develop an attribution framework for better quantification of these mechanisms. We will employ historical observations, reanalysis datasets and a suite of climate model experiments (high-resolution LMDZ4 runs at IITM, coupled model and AGCM runs from IPSL) and output from the CPDN (WP3.2) and weather@home (WP4.1) ensembles to elucidate the dynamical mechanisms associated with Himalayan precipitation extremes and for attribution analyses. We will closely collaborate with PIK and IPSL on the analysis of synchronization of monsoon and mid-latitude circulation and wave resonance mechanisms. The impacts of large-scale climate drivers on the Himalayan precipitation extremes will be assessed.